


All the Better to Eat You With

by orphan_account



Category: The Americans (TV 2013)
Genre: F/M, Supernatural Elements, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-25 15:34:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3815680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elizabeth shifts her jaw, hears it pop. She wants to do more, to let the itch spread and bend her bones under their new weight, to let it reshape her body into something terrible and clean. Because it might be a gift, but it is also a poison; it is also a curse. And it is how they will win this war.</p><p>Or, the one where Elizabeth is also a werewolf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Better to Eat You With

**Author's Note:**

> Don't ask. I don't know where this came from.

It begins with an itch. Something under her skin, in her bones, something she can't reach no matter how she moves her neck, or twists her body. When she was younger and untrained Elizabeth believed it was something she could eventually get rid of, if she tried hard enough. Now she knows it is only something that must be borne. The way her jaw cracks, the way her ribcage stretches. The way her body rearranges itself into the most powerful weapon the Soviet Union could ever possess - even more than bombs and rockets or men in space, what she is is an insidious infiltration; the fact of it lingers in the blood, in the cells of the body.

She doesn’t remember how she became what she is. But she remembers the day the local _sovietnik_ found out, when he’d come to the door in a dark coat, how her mother had stood aside for him. He’d taken her hand. He’d said his name was Gabriel.

“My dear,” he’d said, “I have heard you have a gift.”

And it might be a gift but it is also a poison; it is also a curse. And it is how they will win this war. She shifts her jaw, hears it pop but wants to do more, to let the itch spread and bend her bones under their new weight, to let it reshape her body into something terrible and clean.

“You okay?”

Philip’s voice, low and concerned from the driver’s seat. Moonlight pours across his face through the windshield, white and cold and quiet. She lifts a hand and presses it against the side of his face. Against the light.

“I’m fine,” she says. “I think it’s time.”

He isn’t gone long. She watches his shadow disappear behind the corner of the building, watches him emerge again, behind a man who has only come because Philip has a gun leveled at his back. He gets into the car, puts the man into the backseat. Tonight their prey is a government official, someone with pull in the foreign affairs office. No one particularly high up, but he’s strong-willed. He’ll likely survive it. He smells like fear and parsley, days-old cigarette smoke lingering in his clothes; he has a wife, but also a mistress. He is more afraid of Philip than of her.

They drive in silence, the man’s heartbeat eventually settling into a fast, but steady, rhythm. He’s starting to think maybe they won’t kill him, Elizabeth thinks, and hunches in her shoulders a little more, grips the leather seat a little more tightly. She still looks human, but she can feel her bones starting to shift, a slow, grinding pain she can’t do much about. It’s upon her, the same way it came upon her in the forests of Russia, when the change was painful and purposeless, when being what she was did no one any good at all.

Something in her chest cracks.

“Drive faster,” she tells Philip, from between clenched teeth, in as calm a voice as she can manage.

The warehouse they chose has been abandoned for years, but they still spent the last week monitoring it, just to make sure. Full moon nights are the most important nights of the month, for them; they do other, more conventional spy work as well, but that night is most of the reason Russian government chose to send them here at all. She was twenty, when she came to America. They sent her the day after a change, and her senses were so dull, she hadn’t been able to smell anything; her new home hadn’t been at all like the crisp cold of Russia, the hard shine of coal, and steel, blood and snow and electricity.

“Get out of the car.” Philip’s voice, distant and hard and not directed at her, anyway. She opens her mouth.

She gets out of the car.

The government official is beginning to panic. “What are you—you’re going to kill me, aren’t you. Aren’t you.” Philip has bound the man’s hands together, but not his feet; he doesn’t want to walk as it is, and bound feet would only make this more difficult. Philip leads him into the warehouse; Elizabeth follows. Her body is fluid now, fragmented and strange, not quite hers anymore. She can hold it back, but only for so long.

“No,” Philip says. “We’re not going to kill you. Elizabeth?”

She starts to strip, slowly. The change makes her hand unwieldy. On full moon nights she wears clothes with zippers, exercise pants instead of jeans, nothing with buttons. She always has trouble with her shoes, though, by the end of it, and eventually just kicks them off. Philip watches her the whole time, half in interest, half in preventative caution; when he meets her eyes, though, there’s a calm certainty there that she’s grown to love. And when she’s done, when she stands there, naked, in the rectangle of moonlight thrown by the open door, she lifts her face toward the sky and breathes, and breathes, and lets it take her. 


End file.
